


In the Land of Gods and Monsters

by claritylore



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Cannibalism, Ghouls, M/M, Mpreg, Supernatural Elements, Vampires, Wendigos, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:57:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claritylore/pseuds/claritylore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal Lecter is the last living wendigo, hiding amongst humans to survive, resigned to an eternity living alone and powerless. Then he finds a whole new world to inhabit inside the mind of Will Graham, where he is free at last, and he never wants to let it go.</p><p>>>> This story roughly runs alongside Season 1, with canon events told in a slightly different frame. For example, Will doesn't have encephalitis, he is transforming into a wendigo (remarkably similar symptoms you know). Some major characters are remade in supernatural terms, with young vampire Abigail Hobbs featuring. </p><p>***Warning for lots of dream sequences, some dubious nightmare porn creeping in as the chapters progress and for eventual supernatural mpreg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lonely God

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the story of how the last living wendigo on earth discovered a man with a hole in his mind through which he could live again; how Will Graham changed everything for Hannibal Lecter.

It's a terrible thing for an old god to know loneliness. I once could attest to this, perhaps in greater detail than any other wretched creature on the earth. I knew it on an instinctive level. It swelled within me every wretched day and night.

From the loneliness grew the fear. That was the hardest to take, for one once so capable of inspiring fear in others. I was plagued with a fear of discovery. Not from humans, though that could be quite inconvenient. I feared discovery by any of the monsters who would react to the discovery of a final surviving wendigo with a destructive frenzy.

Six hundred years ago, I was told that the wendigos must stand firm and fight the uprising and hold their place as overlords. Even as our powers were constrained by unnatural means, rendering us near helpless, the few of us that lived scattered and slaughtered, my family pierced with spikes and burned alive, we were told to stand.

Every loss was a star, dimming in the landscape of my mind, until there was nothing but darkness and I was alone. I survived by doing the impossible; I wrapped myself in human skin, held the form for longer than my kin ever believed it was even possible, and remained that way for centuries. So long as I never returned to my wendigo form, I knew that I was safe.

It was a miserable existence but it was an existence.

This is the story of how I broke free of it.

My human name is Hannibal Lecter, a noble name of my choosing, and the sixth I've taken in my time. On occasion, my need to consume human meat and the souls therein has led witchfinders, lawbringers and all kinds of investigators to my door. Now and then I have uprooted to avoid capture. This guise, of a surgeon, a chef and a psychiatrist, has served me better than some, as all three disciplines feed my nature sublimely.

On an evening like most others, I was attending to a patient with a complex set of neuroses manifesting in an innate attraction to demons of certain forms. Humans do sometimes display certain talents on these lines and Franklin Froidevaux was not particularly aware of his ability to sense these creatures. While his neuroses were quite pedestrian, I kept him as a patient because he was useful a divining rod. I would note his reactions towards me from time to time as a means of testing the strength of my human veil. Whenever dear Franklin began to lightly touch, to follow, to obsess about me, I knew a feast was urgently required to maintain myself.

That was the evening which brought Agent Jack Crawford to my door. I was immediately on the defensive when he stepped into my territory, calculating whether it might be possible to kill him and escape detection; whether his presence in my office would be known by others or would be quickly discerned. I knew he was a far more dangerous prospect than the FBI trainee who had not informed anyone of her location before stepping across my threshold. I was simply very attached to my present human form, my work and my life, with no appetite for the work involved in disappearing. If Crawford was investigating me, I would need to kill him.

It wasn't an entirely unappealing prospect. The flesh and souls of the intelligent can often be more satisfying than that of the rude and simple targets that are of greater ease in capture.

Fortunately, on this occasion, it was not necessary. "I want you to help me with a psychological evaluation," he told me, never knowing how close he came to being slit down the centre and digested. He paid me a great many compliments, and while I am not usually inclined to play games and feign my own psychological responses to others, it would have been impolite of me not to appear flattered at that point. Besides, I was intrigued.

That is how I came to encounter Will Graham, on a drizzly fall morning in Baltimore. I had already decided that I could benefit greatly by befriending Agent Crawford and to invite him dine at my table. I had not expected to discover an even more intriguing prospect in the closed down, nervous and defensive young man desperately fighting to avoid my eyes while his locked into and absorbed photo after photo of slaughtered young girls.

He was the reason Crawford had sought me out; a man so empathetic he could inhabit the minds of murderers and see through their eyes, feeling their emotions and absorbing their thoughts. Will Graham had been labelled unstable, never allowed to take up an Agent's post within the FBI, despite his talents. They feared his ability to get too close, I could tell. They didn't trust him. Crawford was not only seeking reassurance that he wouldn't break under the pressure of field work for Will's sake, he needed to know that he wouldn't snap and become as dangerous as the people whose minds he could inhabit.

I recognised his difficulties immediately, and felt a great deal of reward as he forgot himself long enough to look into my eyes, transfixed. "I imagine what you see and learn touches everything else in your mind. Your values and decency are present yet shocked at your associations, appalled at your dreams," I said, projecting this past his ears and into his mind, reaching invisibly inside him to put my own thoughts across. "No forts in the bone arena of your skull for things you love." That was the source of his monstrous empathy; it was as if he had a great hole in the top of his head, gaping and raw, raped by the violence of others. It was oddly beautiful and quite unique.

Even as he stormed out on a sour note, I knew that I had touched something intriguing, though I was not yet certain of what it might be.

That was why I resolved to help this young man. It was for the sake of curiosity. I wanted to understand how such a person could come to be; how he could possess an ability to open his mind to others, in much the same way I am able, though in the opposite direction and with far more abandon. He had no trace of the supernatural about him, he was unmistakably human. It was quite a puzzle.

I needed Will to dine with me and I wanted to help him to understand the killer he was seeking, and so I resolved to leave my next meal in such a way as to lend him the clues he needed to untangle his ability. It also gave me the chance to ensure that he partook of some human meat as well. I am, after all, not one to waste good food.

The tales are, to some degree, true regarding how one may become a wendigo. Though it is rare and difficult to complete, a human may transform with the assistance of a true born wendigo. If they consume enough human flesh and absorb those souls, with a few other ingredients mixed in they can shed their skin too. I wasn't moved to make the attempt to create a companion very often, but I did try once or twice. And in doing so, I discovered that sharing the flesh of their own causes just enough of a corruption in humans to allow me a tunnel of access into their minds.

This proved to be a greatly useful tool over the years. I wanted Jack Crawford at my table so he would never suspect me of any murderous leanings, regardless of his usual intuitions. I wanted Will Graham at my table for the same reason, on one level, but I was aware even then that there was something about him of greater interest.

He was no pig, fit only for slaughter. There was the hint of a light inside him that intrigued me right from the start, as though seeing a newly forming star at last in the void of my mind. I wanted to see inside that vortex in his cranium and touch his nightmares, if only to see just how vivid they really were and how they came to be.

So that is why I prepared a breakfast of human flesh, bathed in the more traditional fare of scrambled eggs, and sought Will out. He'd been put up in a nearby motel while the FBI picked up the rest of the pieces of the girl I'd slaughtered and left mounted on antlers in a field; a flagrant and intentionally flawed homage to the killer he was investigating.

He was very surprised by my arrival, that much was clear, and he was obviously defensive at the intrusion into his space by a stranger. I knew it was a risk in some ways. Will Graham might have refused the meal and asked me to leave him in peace quite easily.

I suppose he was intrigued by me as well. He let me inside and I bathed in the gloom trapped within that motel room, stark against the appalling brightness of the morning light outside. Will accepted my gift of breakfast and I eagerly spooned the remains onto his plate, urging him to feast with me, giving him first bite and thus making him devour the sweet soul of that girl.

Will complimented my cooking, as I knew he would. I could sense the meat against his tongue, in his teeth, sliding past his gullet, down into his body, an act of delicious intrusion without consent. The thrill of the deception stirred the monster within me a little, I cannot deny that. It's the nearest thing to intimacy I am capable of while in human form.

I was pleased that my assistance with his case had led to several revelations within Will's mind. He had deduced that the work was not that of the killer he was investigating, which I found greatly satisfying. My first overtures of faith in him were entirely rewarded. As we spoke, I saw him opening to me, like a flower, and I knew that I would be able to crawl inside his mindspace now and discover all his secrets. I could embed myself enough to affect his judgement.

"I don't find you that interesting," Will told me, while we ate, still defensive and trying to throw up barriers that were simply too battle-worn to be of any effective use.

"You will," I promised. "Agent Crawford tells me you have a knack for the monsters."

Will didn't pick up on my intimation at all, the threads of my influence already tugging at him, making him feel more at ease than he was used to in the presence of others. As I lightly stepped into his head, I saw him as a deep dark well that could never be filled, that could hide all sorts of things. I wanted to fall into the well and see what lay at the end of it, but I refrained.

I did not want to travel there alone, I wanted Will Graham there with me. Most of the people whose minds I corrupt keep very shallow worlds behind their eyes. I am easily bored by them. I sensed something new would be found on this occasion and I wanted to savour it, the way Will had savoured that human flesh for the first time.

Will Graham impressed me not only as a suppository of empathy but as a man of fierce intelligence and a curious wit. He was quick to match my verbal sparring and he found interest in the pictures I painted for him, of mongooses and snakes and china teacups. He understood me, somehow. In no almost time at all, I was quietly breathless with the need to become close to him, to burrow beneath his skin and nestle close.

I considered eating him. I cannot deny that I did. I was curious as to whether his gifts would combust with his death or rise again in ashes within me like a phoenix, elevating my innate power. I also desired the gratification of intimacy bestowed in the act of making his flesh a part of my own. However I restrained my natural compulsions with the thought that his unusual mind was too interesting to suffocate just yet. I did intend to devour him eventually, of course.

I'm glad today that I did not destroy that spark before it came to live. I look upon my discovery of Will Graham as the day I began to awaken from the slumber of my solitude. He was a flame in the darkness to one who had forgotten the warmth and the light; the revelation of sight to a blind wanderer.

Did I decide to try and transform him there and then? No, most certainly not. The thought of companionship was long dead in my mind then. The difficulty and uncertainty, the unwelcome danger any attempt to turn a human would bring, had rendered the thought ridiculous. It wasn't worth the trouble to me then.

Not long after our first feast of fellows, I was sent to accompany Will on a door to door expedition for clues. He didn't really want me along at first, I could tell, but he soon mellowed to the company. For my part, I was bemused to peek behind the curtains of how the FBI does its business, and remarked as such.

"We’re lucky we’re not doing house to house interviews," Will told me, with a gentle tone of sarcasm. "We found a little piece of metal in the clothes Elise Nichols had on. A shred from a pipe threader."

"Jack Crawford wants me to make sure you’re of sound mind and body... to look for metal pipethreaders?"

The smile and the slight huff of a laugh raised my spirits considerably. "That's between you and Jack," he said.

I knew then that my general transgression, of being brought in to psychoanalyse him, had been forgiven. The meal we had shared had opened him to me beautifully. His general sense of unease with everybody and everything was diminished in my presence, by my design. It was probably the first time in years Will had ever felt truly comfortable in the presence of another, though he was still fighting it to some degree. He kept catching himself every time a note of true enjoyment assailed him, muting it down out of an ingrained fear of dependence.

How sweet it would be, I thought, to break him down. It had been so long since I'd found a human of genuine intrigue. While I enjoyed the occasional company of some enough not to kill them, or saw value in the use of a few as thralls, I was rarely moved to pass the point at which a slight diversion might transition into active interest on my part.

Although I wasn't aware of it happening until the day progressed into the landmark of blood and loss that it would soon become in Will's mind.

The odd nature of Will Graham's gift became clear to me when he focused in on a name in a ledger, one of many in a construction site company cabin, and picked out the serial killer who had been nicknamed the Minnesota Shrike, ironically, after my own homage to his work was discovered.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs was a mildly curious killer but no artist; it took the vision of a master to make him one. I elevated this man's work without even intending to.

Perhaps it was this odd sense of connection that made me decide to privately call Hobbs. I was curious as to what would happen if this murderer was alerted to our impending approach. Not about what _he_ would do; I wanted to know what Will would do if he reacted viscerally, as I suspected he would. Will was the far less predictable party.

"Hello?" The voice of a young girl responded to my call.

I was immediately aware of who she must be, according to what Will had told me, of a familial connection being the catalyst for this killer's spree. This had to be the daughter he had not been able to kill.

"I wish to speak to your father. "

"Just a second," she said, and I heard her footsteps shift, and then distantly, "Dad. It’s for you... Caller ID said it was blocked."

I heard the rustle of the phone transferring between hands.

"Mr Garrett Jacob Hobbs?"

A pause. "Yes."

"You don’t know me and I suspect we’ll never meet. This is a courtesy call. Listen very carefully. Are you listening?"

Hobbs' breathing shifted, catching in his throat "Yes."

"They know," I told him, and hung up.

I recall feeling a chill of anticipation in that moment. So simple an act, so severe the possible consequences. It was delicious.

His home was very close by and we approached it with more urgency than was normal. Will seemed calm on the surface, but I could sense turbulence beneath his eyes. His intuition was warring with his logic. While his subconscious knew that Hobbs was the killer he sought, his conscious self wouldn't permit such confidence. Will was such an odd mix of artifice and anxiety, I could see why most people found him confusing and hard going.

A woman burst through the front door of the Hobbs' house, blood cast upon her like an ill moon's light. Will sprang into action, trying to push the life back into her somehow with clumsy hands, while she choked and faded. He ran inside the house while I hung back to observe the corpse. There's always something about them at the moment of death that I find powerful and true, that odd look of realisation on their faces as they wander into a place even I can't imagine.

I heard gunfire exploding from somewhere inside the house, repeatedly, creating a booming din. It didn't compel me to hurry. When I did find my way to the kitchen, Garrett Jacob Hobbs was a deflating red balloon full of bullet holes, slumped in the corner section of the kitchen unit, staring at Will.

"See... see..." he stuttered and died.

I looked, really looked, with the eyes of an elder creature. I saw what he was trying to say almost immediately. While Will grasped hard onto the daughter's neck, trying to contain the blood seeping from a sharp tear across her neck, I saw her shimmer, not fading, something making itself known to me across her pale skin. I saw what Will could not, would not even if he had the ability to look; she wasn't human. She was... vampire, no, fledgling vampire, caught in the halfway house of life and death, and she had been so long before her father had ever tried to tip the balance with that knife. She would survive, in a manner of speaking, regardless of the wound.

Instead I turned my attention to the shaking, panic-stricken remnants of Will Graham's sanity. I reached into his mind and told him, _"trust me"_ , while I brushed his hands away and took command of the situation, applying correct pressure to the girl's neck. I poured myself into that hole in his head, also applying correct pressure of a kind. _"I will save her for you. Because you will it, she will live. I will make sure of it. Trust me. You can trust me. She will live if you trust me."_

Will would not have been able to hear the words, but he would have understood them. His eyes were blown wide, the blue obliterated by the black, blood splatter caught in freeze-frame across the lenses of his glasses, his gaze given entirely over to me like a gift.

This was a defining moment. He was experiencing that moment of truth in death, simultaneously Will Graham, the living, and Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the dying. I sensed something like an endless spiral forming and then fading in the front part of his cranium. It was a pure thing that shouldn't even have been able to exist in a tainted human mind, even for a moment, even in imagination.

I decided to shut down the aura of safety I had been projecting and leave him there, using the pretence of accompanying the injured fledgling to the hospital. The abrupt withdrawal during such a heightened emotional state would indelibly fix the desired association. To reinforce the effect, I remained in the hospital with the girl and feigned sleep the moment I sensed Will was approaching, resting my paw over hers, playing human.

He was containing himself again but all of the twigs stacked around the sagging fort in his head were snapping. Fear and remorse was sliding off of him in great waves. Best of all, I could feel him reaching out for me, without any real awareness, trying to find that projected wall of safety again. I kept it all but locked away, only giving him the barest flutter, the hint of an ankle.

A few nights later, I drove out to Wolf Trap. Before I forsook my wendigo form, I could have ran there in the night like a dread hurricane (a wendigo is, after all, a wind runner above all things). Human travel is always a far more tedious prospect, but this was worth the effort. I knew that Will would be vulnerable and tormented by now, the trauma of killing Garrett Jacob Hobbs really settling in, like burst capillaries raising purple and yellow bruises under his skin, only in spiritual form.

I parked up in a concealed lay about a mile up the road and walked the rest of the way. The moon was out, full and rude that night and I was dimly aware of a werewolf prowling somewhere in the woodlands some distance far behind me. The road was misty, barely there, and I followed it into the dream that awaited with great anticipation.

When Will's house came into view, I stood back for a while, far enough away to flee if needed but near enough to see what I wanted. I caught sight of Will in his kitchen, feeding his dogs. When the deed was done, he suddenly looked up as if startled and stared out of the window, as if he'd seen or heard something. I knew that the rolling white would conceal me from prying eyes but wondered if, somehow, he actually sensed my presence. It seemed impossible but Will was surprising me in a lot of ways. In any case, he dropped his gaze after a minute or two and retreated.

There are few true virtues which I can claim to possess, and patience happens to be one of them. I waited for hours, circling the house, monitoring him, until finally I knew that he had gone to sleep. The turbulence that existed around him diminished and went still. And so I too lay back on the grass and closed my eyes.

The sleep of a wendigo is a very different thing to that of a human. I may be wrapped in a suit of skin, hiding the truth of my form from the world, but at the core I am not one of them. Some trappings of my true self remain in this skin, regardless of concealment. Normally, to rest, I retreat into the darkness where those stars used to live and recharge in the void. However, I am also able to enter a state that allows me to leave my body and wander into the minds of those whom I have poisoned with flesh, which appears quite similar on the surface.

I crawled out of my body, like a snake going by the house, and slid inside Will Graham's sanctuary. I soon found my way to his bed, past a workbench covering in fishing lures and tools, past the dogs lying nearby as his guardians, to where he lay already twitching with dreams. My projection stood over him and observed him, a spectre at the feast, sans the unpleasant associations. I then entered him through the empathetic hole in his skull and jumped into the well at last.

Like Alice, I tumbled down and down into a dark hole and landed unharmed on a bed of leaves. I found myself in a vivid recreation of a forest, so real I could smell the dying leaves, hear the water of a stream nearby, and winced with the sunlight coming in through the tree branches, the sky vast above me.

I fanned my fingers into the leaves and touched the grass beneath, delirious with sensation. As I looked, everything I touched crumbled and turned black, and I smiled. While the brilliance of the sky above me began to fade, I rose to my feet and took a look at myself in the reflection of the stream. My human face melted, which brought me great satisfaction to see, but I was surprised to see my true wendigo face beneath appearing so gaunt and starved. I was dying without even knowing it.

It wasn't how I wanted to appear for Will, so I allowed my subconscious mind to transform me. I looked again and saw the face of a great black stag, my antlers and my black feathers still part of my visage, but recreated into the form of a more symbolic creature.

I was actually quite bemused by this; a stag is a masculine emblem of a sexual nature in dreams. To a patient, I would have given a diagnosis of psychosomatic interaction with repressed sexual desires.

Before I could analyse the meaning of this in my own mind, I saw Will standing on the other side of the stream, in a meadow of daisies, a wolf-like dog sitting beside him. I trotted through the water and went towards him feeling damp and marvelling at the completeness and beauty of this world he inhabited internally.

At first I held back at a distance. He turned and stared at me, or perhaps through me. I considered coming closer, letting him discern that I didn't belong there, but decided that it would be better not to just yet.

Out in the distance, I could see the Hobbs house, isolated in Will's mind in a way it wasn't in reality, bathed in a blood red light with rolling storm clouds gathered above it. Garrett Jacob Hobbs was standing on the porch, a walking corpse. 

Will was now slowly making his way to the house and I decided to follow him. The wolf-dog followed behind Will like a guardian. I trotted close enough to skewer the creature that had been a line of defence to him on my antlers. I tossed it aside, taking its place at Will's back. Another of his fragile barriers had been destroyed.

As he approached the Hobbs house, Mrs Hobbs bursting through the door covered in red and spurring him into action again, I decided to leave Will to his fruitless and repeating confrontation in order to see what else lay in the world of his making and how much I could influence it.

In the minds of men, I tend to float like a gasp of air, able to bear witness and manipulate them but not to interact. I felt an odd sense of freedom in the vivid colours of Will's mind and ran, fast like a real wendigo, into a forest that circled around the landscape. The light grew dark, the warmth cold, and I at last ran freely for the first time in hundreds of years. The forest was vast and beautiful and I could feel the ground pound against my hooves and the scratches of the tree branches I whipped through. I discovered more of Will's wolf-dogs, the pacing guardians of his thoughts, and ran through several with my antlers. Then I dropped the stag form and became a wendigo again so I could chase them down and rip them apart with my claws and teeth.

The blood of his guardians, even the blood, tasted vivid and right to me, so close to real I nearly forgot where I was. I felt so alive it was intoxicating. In that brief time, I was restored and delirious with the sensation of it.

When I could find no more of the pacing wolf-dogs to destroy, I was led by a bright light back towards the meadow of daisies where Will had reset to in his nightmare.

I became the stag again as I approached. He saw me, sort of, once again and began back towards the house. I called to him in my silent internal voice, _"stop"_ , and was surprised when he obeyed.

"Hannibal," he murmured, startling me. I looked again and saw my human self standing before Will, created in detail, right down to the clothes I had worn that fateful day. He had inducted me into his hall of mental companions, never knowing that I was already there with him.

The other Hannibal wasn't quite right; he had a far softer look about his eyes than I knew I had. He stood like a rock between Will and the nightmare house, casting a long shadow backwards towards it.

"Hannibal," Will said again, this time with more of a sob. As he began to slump, this version of me he had conjured lifted him into his arms and held him like a distraught child.

In the absence of the wolf-dog that he'd had with him before, and the ones that had run about the periphery of his mindscape, I guessed that Will had built a new mental guardian out of the most present and safe person in his subconscious.

 _"You're safe,"_ I told him silently, and watched him bury his face into the crook of my avatar's neck. _"Trust me."_

Where I stood, the meadow was dead. My malign influence in his mind was spreading outwards in a circle. The sky was becoming turbulent and dark above us. It was beautiful.

I watched as one of my black feathers shed from me and floated across to him on the gathering winds, spinning gently and landing unseen to him on his chest. Then I willed myself to join with the Hannibal he had created, feeling Will heavy in my arms and against me, so I could reach around to pick up the feather and delicately place it into Will's mouth, feeding it to him.

His gentle acceptance of that small part of me touched me in a strange way. I lost some of my control, parts of my wendigo form breaking free of the visage he had created, skin and clothes snapping apart. My claws dug into him, breaking his flesh and he started at the pain, face immediately awash with horror at the sight of my true face.

Will started awake at that, jolting me out of his mind. I landed beside his bed, expelled like the nightmare itself, an invisible monster at his side. The immediate sense of loss was palpable to me, it felt so new. I had not known the solace of freedom as I had in Will's internal world for a long time.

I watched him as he flailed and twitched, eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness. I heard snuffles and whimpering from the hoard of dogs behind me, waking in distress as well alongside their master. Will coughed and spluttered as he sat up a little, and then reached into his mouth.

He pulled a black feather, shiny with saliva, past his lips and held it up with a look of pure surprise.

I snapped back into my physical body in shock.

Will had pulled something from his mindscape out into reality. It wasn't possible. That was a wendigo ability, but I had not conjured it. I wasn't in fact able to conjure it; it had always taken more than one of my kind to perform such a feat, in the days when we were feared by all for this ability to join wills and turn reality into the nightmares of our choosing.

I had an urge to run into the house and go check to make sure I hadn't imagined that impossible feather appearing on his tongue. I knew that it would be foolish, however. So instead I stood there, perfectly still, marvelling.

That was when I realised.

Will Graham was not going to be my feast or my prey. He was going to be my mate. There was something about him, unfathomable and nearly supernatural in of itself, that restored me. I'd never found anyone like him before, so able to absorb the darkness of others it rooted and grew in his mind and elevated his imagination almost beyond the boundaries of normal human perceptions.

The prospect of making an attempt to transform Will into a wendigo inspired a large sense of fear in me, I must admit. The few times I had attempted before, when I was new to the loneliness and not so wise to the dangers, had resulted in some very messy and disappointing deaths.

The problem was that every supernatural being in the vicinity would start to sense Will's change as soon as the effect took decent hold. They would react with an evolutionary fervour to the extreme threat of a wendigo, and I would be powerless to protect him without revealing myself as well, summoning all the hounds of hell to my door. Even with two of us, it would be difficult to survive an onslaught. I would have to mate him quickly, elevating his power to something approaching my own in the bearing of others. We could stand together in time, as a family, and make them all cower with fear. I would be free to feast, to run, to reshape reality to my liking and to live in my own skin again.

But there was simply no way Will could survive long enough to become what I wanted. It was maddening. Will was born to be mine. That was the only way to explain the feather; it was a sign of his potential, his destiny.

I do not mean that in a biblical or a wishful sense. It mean that I considered that it might be a result of ripples of reality being reshaped by our future selves to such a degree they had echoed back, bestowing some small power on him now. 

While I ambled back to the car, I considered the problem from every angle. I wondered if I could lock him away somewhere remote and keep his transformation hidden that way, but it was impractical and very unlikely to succeed as a plan. I considered seeking out the circle of warlocks for hire who had rendered my fellow wendigos unable to fight back against the uprising all that time ago, seeking out a means to enlist their aid, but I had no idea if they even still existed. I even wondered if I could speed the process up by force-feeding him human flesh like a goose, but I knew that just wasn't how it worked. To some degree I would need his trust if this was to work.

While I fed his body soul after human soul to corrupt his sense of self, and made him bloated with human meat to change his nature, I would also need to feed his mind in a very particular way. I would have to plunder every corner of that sanctuary and blacken it, teaching him to accept that his place is in the darkness, with me. I would need to guide him to accept his transition from man to monster and, most importantly, to crave my touch. That was paramount if we were to survive together. 

The answer came to me the next day as I sat beside the unconscious fledgling vampire girl we had found, Miss Abigail Hobbs. Her mind was an open plain to me while she slept so soundly. She dreamed in tones of burnt umber and dark green, chasing deer through sparse woods, her father's whispers creating a sort of whirlwind of sound in her mindscape.

I watched young Abigail running with the deer, then turning on them and ripping their throats out with her as yet not fully formed vampire teeth. She had the potential to be quite the fierce little thing without proper guidance. I decided that if I were to give her sufficient nurture, replace the inadequate father she had known, the girl could be taught to command her own urges to the degree that she might be of use to me. It was a calculation of risk, but I believed that it was at last time to act, despite the danger and the effort involved.

Abigail was just what I needed. She was a sharp and deadly hook, concealed in pretty coloured cotton and feathers. 

My lure.


	2. The Fledgling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Garrett Jacob Hobbs told Will to "see, see", only Hannibal actually saw. He wanted Will to see his daughter, Abigail, for what she truly is; a fledgling vampire he has been killing for to prevent her from becoming a monster. Ordinarily, Hannibal would have no interest in such a creature. This time, he sees an opportunity.

I was born in a cold place, dark and desolate, on a bed of human blood. This was as per my own wishes. The children of wendigo do not come to consciousness once expelled from the body of a parent; they awaken within the dreams of their people and live in their own playground first. I knew my parents almost from the point of conception and they taught me well before I was born into this physical realm. I desired to be birthed in the heat of a massacre, in the night, where I would see the stars and the moon when I opened my new eyes, and so it was.

Abigail Hobbs was born in a warm embrace that had seemingly left little trace on her. She had certainly had no say over it and was barely aware of her own nature, save to know the desire for blood enough for her human father to act as he did. We could not have been more different, yet she was going to have to be bound to me all the same.

This child had been turned quite recently I surmised. She wasn't yet one of the undead. She had been prevented from following her natural instincts to make the first human kill that would have completed her transition from human to full vampire. The sweet scent of humanity still lingered within her, beneath the coming rot.

It was all becoming quite clear to me how this had transpired. 

Garrett Jacobs Hobbs was no artist because, really, he was no killer. Not in the way some men are. He was killing those girls to prevent the final loss of innocence in his own daughter, sating her desire for blood with their flesh, but taking great care to prevent her from actually ending a life herself. He killed out of love for her, nothing more. My phone call had sent him into a sufficient spiral of fear to try and finally release Abigail from her affliction, and he had murdered his own wife to prevent her from having to see and live with the bitter truth. 

Generally speaking I am not a fan of vampires. I find them quite revolting. The vampire race is proof that the power of a supernatural form is uselessly diluted in numbers. We wendigos were few but we were the most powerful beings that ever walked the earth for it. Vampires are a human virus, easily spread and cursed more with weakness than with strength, in my opinion.

It would be a brand new game to embrace one to me. In her dreams, I found no reference to a monster in the shadows; the fiend who had made her what she was. Her sire had apparently not stayed to push her to a full transformation or to teach her the ways of her kind, rendering her entirely maleable to my needs. She was a blindfolded lamb with the instincts of a wolf. I would need to make her a blindfolded wolf with the appearance of a lamb.

That particular task could not begin until she had awoken. As she was not yet actually undead, she would take time to recover. Medical science was still required to nurse her back to health, and so she would need to remain in the hospital for some time.

I returned home to Baltimore and called Jack Crawford. I needed him at my table as soon as possible, to make him an unwitting third party to the destruction of Will Graham's humanity. If Abigail was to be the cornerstone of my plan, he needed to be the bedrock beneath it.

He was eager for reassurance after the bloodbath that had occurred. Will had never pulled a trigger like that before; not so many times, not to kill. I barely needed to make the suggestion, he was so ready to demand it. I would conduct a full psychological evaluation of his most precious pony and give him the closure his conscience demanded as soon as possible.

I invited him to dine at my table, under the pretence of discussing the matter of Will Graham further, and he was eager to accept. For my part I knew that the sooner he came to rely upon me, to not question me, the better. As Will grew increasingly unstable with his slow transformation, I would need Jack to trust whatever I said on the matter, believing intrinsically that my help was the best and only solution available.

Furthermore I was feeling quite tense by the time I stepped into my house. My skin was itching in a way I hadn't felt for some time. The experience of running again, being free and true, even if only in dream form, was suddenly making it more difficult to remain placid in my human shell. My kind were all born with natural duality, able to seem entirely human to suit our needs, but we were simply not designed to stay fixed in that form. It required a great deal of concentration and, I discovered in my decision to hide in that way, I still needed to kill and consume flesh, even in the wrong form, to keep my wendigo self from bursting out of the confines I had set it into. I had to cook the meat to suit my human palate, rather than feast on it raw. To hunt a feast for Jack Crawford was a good excuse to go out and sate my gnawing hunger for a human soul and some fresh blood.

I chose a florist with a persistent deception in the dating of her flowers as my mark. She had ruined a bouquet intended for an exquisite singer I made the acquaintance of during a production of Gounod's Faust some months previously. The beautiful lady portraying the pivotal role of Margarete had deserved better than a basket of flowers which had wilted almost within a day, and so a business card was procured for future reference. 

It seemed fitting to pair her organs with a French Chardonnay of fruity bouquet, so I kept the meal light and creamy to match. I was eager to impress Jack Crawford, because he was a man with a carefully hidden but easily unearthed deferential complex. He had prefabricated a view of me as existing in a higher status social circle than his own. He wasn’t comfortable in the slightest in the intimate setting of my dining room. This manifested in a vulgar eagerness to discuss every aspect of the meal, the wine, the arrangement of the dish, and with the curious adaptation of his manner of speaking to match my own. He was plainly not a regular guest to dinners and his uneasy attempts to appear at home were a textbook psychological response to the situation, given his upbringing and white collar background.

I encouraged him to take the first bite of the meal, almost hearing the hiss of that lady's soul burning into nothing inside him. The little wisp of corruption buried delightfully in him and his mind opened to me. 

Unlike the rich meadows of Will's internal landscape, Jack had constructed a maze of metallic walls under cold bluish lights, much like parts of the FBI building he worked in. He was a compartmentaliser. Every box was an impression or a memory, cast in isolation. This rendered him organised and able to function well in his role as an FBI profiler, but it also prevented vital connections from being made between the closed boxes of his understanding. He was patently of no threat to me.

With the barest of effort, Crawford left my house that evening with full confidence in my abilities as a psychiatrist and a notable absence of any sort of suspicions as to my motives whatsoever. Indeed, I heard a voice emanating from his rather plain mind, whispering through the metallic corridors, repeating, _"he's quite charming"_ , over and over. I resolved to invite him over again some time soon, just for fun.

With my mind and body sated by the meal, I decided it was time to retire to bed. It had been an exceptionally long few days and I had a great deal to contemplate in the quietude of my half sleep. I rested my head on a satin pillow and stared into my ceiling for a while, thinking of Will.

Warmth spread through my body and I put a hand over the spot where the sensation was at its most intense, in the apex of my stomach. I had been too young to take a mate when I lost the others. The idea of doing so now roused something primal and sharp within me. I hummed and sighed at the thought of a dark and lithe wendigo with Will's face, running freely with me, fighting with me for dominance until, finally, I would force him to submit to me under a blood moon sky, joining us in a bond that would be eternal and pure. I saw myself claiming his body in a frenzy, out on the edge of a cliff, with the black ocean rising below us and dark clouds rolling above. I wanted to howl with abandon and breed him over and over and see the new star of our creation flicker to life in the void. The very thought made me shiver.

I knew it was idle fancy at this stage. The general problems involved with creating a wendigo from a mere human remained and I did not yet know if my plan for Abigail would work as I needed it to. All I had to go on at this point was a certainty that the black feather Will had pulled out of his nightmare was a sign of our future, and the half glimpsed impression of a dim new light hiding somewhere in that black and empty place where I used to dream. 

Will came to me a day or two later, tense enough to snap in half and only able to engage with me from the upper level of my office. He needed distance to function. I knew that he was starting to wean himself off my projected aura of stability and protection, so I spoke to him gently in my mind, reopening the connection. I could tell by the way he swayed as he watched me, that he was hearing me subconsciously.

With a flourish, I presented a pre-printed and signed letter for him to peer down onto. 

"What’s that?" he asked.

"Your psychological evaluation. You are totally functional and more or less sane. Well done."

I had absolutely no interest in conducting any sort of meaningful assessment on his state of mind. I had no cause to prevent Will from continuing to pollute his imagination with horrific crime scene reconstructions; my playground would be all the richer for it. So a rubber stamp was all that was required.

His note of relief and delight resounded back through me, like a ball thrown in my direction. Will had been dreading this, I could tell. That dread was what had made him push back on my embedded suggestion that I was the only one he could trust. It flew, birdlike, away and all barriers dropped. "Jack thinks that I need therapy," Will said, the seriousness of his earlier tone forgotten.

I smiled gently, tilting my head up to him. "What you need is a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there," I said. A small lie to help Will towards a greater truth.

"Last time he sent me into a dark place, I brought something back," he said, growing serious again.

This was good. It was a conversation that I had hoped we'd come to. "A surrogate daughter? You saved Abigail Hobbs’ life. You also orphaned her."

Will winced at the thought. I felt a pang for his own parental losses reverberate through him in response to my words.

"That comes with certain emotional obligations, regardless of empathy disorders."

"You were there. You saved her life too." He wasn't trying to shift responsibility; rather he was welling up with fear at the thought of having to take some sort of role in the life of another. Will was not able to function socially in his dull human form. I doubted parenthood had ever even occurred to him before. "Do you feel obligated?" he asked, but I nearly missed it. I was drifting with the contemplation that he had never really fitted into the skin he was born with; how he would thrive when reborn wild and powerful.

"Yes," I said. "I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility. I’ve fantasised about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs." Of course, I had done no such thing, but it seemed to soothe him to believe that I had.

"Jack thinks Abigail Hobbs helped her dad kill those girls," he said, and I had to catch him before he fell into a spiral of introspection on the matter, cradling him in my mind to prevent the plunge.

It quickly became apparent that Abigail Hobbs was occupying a role in his thoughts that was not reflective of reality. She was the innocent young girl, captured in the grip of a madman, for whom Will had sacrificed his own innocence. Only in believing that narrative, implicitly, could he contain his own loose strings and the imprinted echo of Hobbs' thoughts which were still roaming. I tested this assertion by stating that Crawford was right to suspect her of being involved with her father's murders; he was quick to shut the suggestion down.

"Is this therapy, or a support group?" he asked, wry and yet eager to change the subject.

"It’s whatever you need it to be. And Will... the mirrors in your mind can reflect the best of yourself, not the worst of someone else." I saw him falling into my gaze, my words mapping a new pathway of thought in his mental arena.

I sighed internally, his potential never so real to me as it was then. It was difficult to hold myself in check and avoid slipping too deeply into the well while he was awake and aware. It was too soon for to play my cards so openly, much as it was tempting.

It was for the best that Will's next case took him away from me for several days. I needed to regroup. I amused myself by entertaining Jack Crawford for a meal once again, wandering around his mind until I located the metal box containing the FBI trainee I had killed two years previously, young Miriam Lass, preserved on the wall with pins like a butterfly that had died too soon. 

When Will returned to my office for his next session, he was frazzled. I gave him a packed meal made specifically for him; a rude shopkeeper formed the base ingredient. He didn't want to partake at first, finding it a little offputting to eat in my office during a therapy session, but I had to insist. I needed to pour a great many souls into him and that meant making this a regular ritual for our meetings. I knew I was going to be kept extremely busy hunting for him and I couldn't have been happier. 

While he ate the meal he told me more of what had happened in the interim time. He'd had to pull the trigger on another serial killer, some sort of human-mushroom farmer. I had followed the case on tattlecrime.com and decided it was likely the killer, a pharmacist called Eldon Stammets, was attempting to cultivate faery rings. Not that the FBI would have picked up on that.

While their confrontation meant nothing to me specifically, I was pleased in so far that the event allowed me to lead Will to an important admission.

"I liked killing Hobbs," he confessed, the words staggering breathily as though they were emanating from a hidden pit deep in his chest, from where they had to climb out to be heard, nails breaking on the walls. I could feel the second human soul combusting inside him as he said it, giving him the push he needed to confess his dark secret. I rewarded him as best I could, telling him I understood and that he had done the right thing.

"Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. And are we not created in his image?" I knew no singular being of that name existed, not in a world which made monsters like me, but I liked the potential to corrupt the idea and delve into the philosophy around it. It served me well with several of my more disconnected patients.

We spoke further on the subject until his hour was up and then Will bid me goodnight. I offered to drive him home as he seemed quite tired, his thoughts sketchy and vague, and genuinely hoped he would say yes and grant me a good excuse to go to Wolf Trap. Unfortunately, he politely declined. 

I didn't plan to drift that way all the same. I just found myself following him. I couldn't help it; I wanted to burrow into him again and scratch the itch under my skin. I too felt tired and I wanted to live happily for a while inside his pretty little nightmares. 

I followed the same pattern as before, parking at a distance and then circling his house on foot until I could tell he had fallen asleep at last. His thoughts had been quite disturbed so he spent a lot of time actively trying to slide into the bliss of unconscious rest. Relieved that he reached his meadows at last, I lay down in much the same place as before and projected myself outwards, into his house and into his head.

The bed of leaves that had been my landing spot before had been replaced with a soft canopy of mushrooms. The details of Will's most recent case was at the forefront of his mind it seemed. There were so many mushrooms, some monstrously huge, some hardly there at all, I couldn't see far past them.

I was the great stag again and I kicked their heads to pieces until I was free, enjoying the sponge-like texture and the scent of sweetly rotting corpses that accompanied them. More wolf-dogs awaited me when I at last clamoured free of the mushroom forest and crossed the stream again to reach Will's meadow. I killed every single creature that dared to approach me. Will had no defences against me whatsoever and never would.

It took some time to locate him as he was buried, only his hand left above the surface like a wilted sunflower. I listened and I could hear him sobbing from inside the shallow grave of his devising. At first I moved to leave him there while I went and played in the forest, but the sound of Will in distress had an odd effect on me. It drew me back, made me unable to move or have a care beyond helping him, which was a very new sensation to me. 

I concentrated on him and had to force myself back into a human visage. I needed the dexterity of hands in order to be able to dig him out and I didn't yet want to reveal my true face to him. When he began to appear, his skin was blue and cold, his teeth gritted tightly shut. I wrenched him out of the soil and held him close, telling him that he was safe now, safe with me. It was important to keep reinforcing that message to his subconscious.

"What were you doing in the ground, Will?" I asked.

"Abigail."

"Abigail?"

"We were... connected," he mumbled in hazy response.

I looked out into the distance and saw that the Hobbs house was on fire, though the figure of Garrett Jacob Hobbs remained untouched on the porch. I didn't quite understand the significance of Will burning that place in his mind yet, though assumed it must be symbolic of some sense of catharsis over what had happened in that house. He was accepting that he could not return to it in his mind forever, reliving a doomed chain of events.

It was gratifying that he was seeking out Abigail in some fashion. It meant that ineffable sense of obligation I was trying to cultivate had taken hold. 

However, I am a jealous god, so I was eager to reinforce that he should still seek me out for a connection first and foremost. Abigail was, on one level of my plan, intended to be an avatar to teach him to desire parenthood, but their connection was a means to an end. His submission to me had to come first.

"Will, look at me," I commanded and he did. When I smiled, he smiled in return, calming from his ordeal beneath the earth of his making. " _We_ are connected," I said, firmly.

He was engrossed in my face as I spoke and so didn't notice the gathering clouds appearing overhead and the steady decline and death of everything near to us. 

I let my wendigo form slip just a tiny amount, just enough for a single finger to grow black and sharp ended. I was getting to grips with my form in Will's mind, gaining more control as he grew acclimatised to my presence. I lifted his hand and used my nail to scratch a line onto the back of it. He flinched a little but didn't try to stop me.

The trickle of blood that appeared in the cut was alluring. I brought his hand to my lips and tasted it, all the while holding eye contact with him. It tasted truly divine, the very wine of the gods. I looked down at him and wondered what it would be like to kiss a human. It wasn't something I found appealing; they were my prey, not my equals. The scent wasn't right. I desired them for the feast and nothing more. Yet with Will, I felt a new and different kind of hunger. I suppose I was already imagining him how I wanted him to become; I desired the powerful, strong, unearthly wildling just waiting to be given life.

Suddenly, he was fighting to break free of my hold. I don't know if something showed in my expression. All I know is that he was spooked. I released him easily, maintaining the passive appearance of a figment of his imagination. 

"You don't belong here," he gasped. 

I smiled and let myself evaporate into the air, excited that he could recognise that I was an intruder so soon. It was a sign that he was already becoming different, tuning in to me and to the darkness taking root inside him. The way he stepped closer and reached out, trying to prevent me from fading away, was delightful. 

He turned and started towards the burning Hobbs house, his eyes growing distant. Far away, across the meadow, the fire waned and the structure rebuilt itself into what it was before. Will was retreating back into his pattern of returning to that house in his mind, trying to change things that could never be changed.

I let him be. I could sense that I wouldn't get anything further from interaction this night. He had to work through the intensity of that encounter with Hobbs in his own way.

Instead I went exploring, back and forth through the forests, the mushroom field, through the mists where Will's house floated like a ship, over to the cliffs into nothing at the edge of his private world. I tried to create something of my own there, out of my own memories. I tried to put a child's roundabout there, on the shadowy cliff, like a flag on a newly discovered world, but I couldn't fix it in place. That step would have to wait, I realised. For now, I should be grateful for what I had been given; this endless arena of texture, sounds, tastes and chaotic beauty, where I could breathe again for the first time in centuries.

I received the news that Abigail had awoken the very next day. Hearing this inspired a great deal of anticipation. I was eager to take her under my proverbial wing and to begin the process of forging bonds. However it was decided, in my absence, that my colleague Dr Bloom would be assigned the task of dissecting the mind of the Hobbs girl, looking for clues as to her guilt as one looks for cultivation in a petri dish. 

I at least put myself in the right place at the right time to accompany my colleague to a meeting with Jack Crawford on her findings with regards to Abigail's state of mind and her possible guilt; the first of several that would take place in the following weeks. Alana Bloom described her as manipulative. Jack Crawford was convinced of her guilt. They were both entirely correct. 

I kept silent on the matter for the most part, save for the occasional note of false defence as to her probable innocence, and only making my opinion known with the idea that Will Graham should talk to her next. Of course, I agreed to allow it with caution as to handling Will's fragile recovery in person. It was an excellent excuse to get to work on my project.

We went to the lecture hall where Will was teaching straight after that meeting. He was speaking on the subject of Garrett Jacob Hobbs when I entered, which was not entirely unexpected. His sudden focus onto what he called the 'Copycat Killer', however, was, and I watched with a note of amusement as he spoke about the kill I had carried out for his benefit, never knowing he was staring almost straight at his culprit, not discerning the part he had playing in inspiring that particular design.

_He is an intelligent psychopath... he is a sadist... he knew enough about Garrett Jacob Hobbs' murders to elevate them to art... did he engage him?... he received an untraceable call... I believe the as-yet unidentified caller was our Copycat killer..._

He was dipping his toes into my mind, mapping out my way of thinking, just as I was carving a place in his. I hadn't fully realised the reciprocal nature of our connection until that lecture. I couldn't help the note of pleasure that resounded through me. Of course, he was still viewing everything through the prism of his human experience, so could not yet fathom motives or details. I am artist through boredom with the human condition, and my own endless being craves for something greater than the mundane repetitiveness of the devouring of prey. He did not discern that level of detail. Still, he had come quite close and peered into the abyss with more accuracy than I had anticipated at that point. Even with the dusty echo of Hobbs occupying the same space in his mind as I was, it felt like a breakthrough.

When I was able to get closer, I looked to his hand, seeking out the line of red I had placed there in his dreams. It was exactly where I’d put it. Any tiny leftover shard of doubt that had remained with me evaporated then. 

He was for me.

I rewarded him for this confirmation, and for his insights, with a meal that evening. Something a little special; twins, both wealthy and reckless when alive, whom I had met three years previously at a book signing. I devoured the soul of one, and gave the other to him. It seemed poetic, like the consummation of a union, even though he had no idea of the bargain at hand.

We visited Abigail in the facility she was moved to soon after. At the insistence of Jack Crawford, we went together. I could sense Will leaning on me for stability, reaching out to grasp the calmness I could project into his thoughts, to cope with the prospect of facing the girl whose father he had killed.

It turned out to be very necessary. The agitator of Freddie Lounds' interference with our meeting, with her slander thrown in all directions like darts seeking a board, put Will very much on edge. It changed his mood entirely, that little note of corruption bubbling upwards, nearer to the surface than ever before so that when she tried to offer her business card to Abigail, he snatched it from her hand with an almost sinister confidence I hadn't seen in him before. Indeed, when we left and she tried to make a formal introduction, he actually confronted her, those eyes that usually feared contact locking onto her with an icy precision and a wonderful air of threat. "Miss Lounds... it's not very smart to piss off a guy who thinks about killing for a living."

There it was; the killer I knew he could be, rising to the surface for a moment. It was joyous.

But anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. It is important to note that our meeting with Abigail was of great use. Will let go of my proffered support, like a child releasing its father's hand, and he instead reached out to her.

Pale and beautiful, she glided with us to the facility's greenhouse, accepting our presence gracefully. With eight souls devoured, she was a dark thing at the core indeed. I could smell her corruption, even as she spoke in soft terms about her mother and father.

"He was loving right up until the second he wasn't,” she said. "He kept telling me he was sorry. To just... hold still. He was going to make it all go away."

"There was plenty wrong with your father Abigail but there's nothing wrong with you," Will said, with assuredness that didn't belong there, in the tainted airspace between three killers.

She knew there was, however. Though she said nothing out loud, I heard the whisper in her mind all the same. _"Yes there is, I needed them, every one of them. I want more."_

"You say he was loving? I believe it," Will continued. "That's what you brought out in him."

At least in that Will was correct. It was a love so great he killed for her. He’d been a good father.

She spoke of fearing her own nightmares. I was able to reassure her that we would help her with that. I told her that out loud, and I also silently told Will that I would keep him safe too when he complained of the same fear.

They spoke together of what it was to kill and how it felt.

"It's the ugliest thing in the world," Will told her.

Even back then, I could sense those words were floating on the surface of what Will Graham was at the centre. They had no roots. They were tiny droplets on a glassy ocean. He did not yet accept that, but he was aware of his own deception, which was an acceptable starting point to me.

Things proceeded much as I wanted from there. At Abigail's behest, a trip to Minnesota was arranged, to the house which stank of coppery blood and chemicals, where the word 'CANNIBALS' had been etched across the garage door in faeces.

I thought I detected a mental barrier in my direction from Abigail for the first time on that trip. She was reaching out to Will first and foremost, which suited me well, and was content to speak with Alana Bloom. She listened to my words but I felt no sense of engagement, which was curious to me at first. She hadn't been so closed on our first meeting.

The reason why quickly became apparent to me, when we got onto the subject of finding evidence of what her father had done.

"Are we going to reenact the crime?" she asked, with a sudden animation that hadn't been in evidence before. "You be my dad," she said, pointing to Will. "You be my mom," she continued to Alana. Then she fixed her eyes onto me and said, "and you be the man on the phone."

The barrier dropped and she leapt into my thoughts. _"I know who you are,"_ I heard her in my mind. _You know what I am, don't you?_

Manipulative indeed. She had been told that whoever called the house that day was the Copycat Killer. She had recognised my voice. But she hadn't shared this information; she was curious. I felt, above all things, hope emanating from her. This half-dead child, cast adrift in a world that could not understand her, was afraid and seeking the safe harbour of someone capable of understanding what she was. 

Normally, I would have ignored any being reaching out to me in this way. I would have played my part as a simple human. Now, I knew that everything had to change. I had to take some risks if it meant securing Will's future with me.

 _"Yes,"_ I answered. _I'm here to help you."_

I knew that she had heard me. Even as she spoke in normal human terms to Alana and to Will, I was listening to her on another level and she knew it.

 _"I don't need you. Only she can help me now,"_ she warned.

Before I could ask her to elaborate, someone stepped into the room. A girl, of startling resemblance to Abigail herself, made her presence known and I felt the air go chill. There was private passion in their cold embrace and I recognised that this girl, Marissa, was Abigail's sire. No monster then; a mirror image.

It seemed quite obvious that Abigail was the one who had chosen the girls she desired and her father had acted according to her wishes. While Will and Alana saw Marissa and wondered why Hobbs had not dispatched her for her similarity to Abigail, I wondered about Abigail's want to feast on girls that bore a resemblance to her sire. It was an interesting development, psychologically speaking.

As the two girls went to take a walk alone, I could almost taste the fission of a teenage infatuation. Abigail had been turned by her friend, probably without even knowing it, in the haze of youthful experimentation. This girl knew what she was and was already a killer herself and she wanted Abigail for a companion.

She was a threat to my design. Her fate was decided the moment I saw her.

To cut a long story short, the brother of my Hobbs tribute, Nicholas Boyle, made an appearance. Abigail threw a rock at him and his blood was conveniently left on the side of it. This I hid for later use.

I killed the vampire girl in the night, while Will and Abigail shared dreams of him slashing her neck, over and over, just as her father had. Will didn't see me there, in my stag form, but Abigail did. She saw me and gave me the alibi I needed.

I couldn't remain there for long though so I went to work. I scented the stale vampire flesh all the way to Marissa’s nearby home and snapped her neck before she even knew I was there. That wouldn't kill her, I knew. It merely incapacitated her long enough to carry her to the cabin where Abigail had feasted on the blood of all those girls who had looked just like her friend. I mounted her on stag antlers, the way Abigail’s father had mounted and bled out his victims, letting her dark and sour blood drip down into a pool. I then pulled out her heart to end her for good and left her there for discovery the next day. 

Most importantly, I placed the blood of my tribute's brother at the crime scene. Abigail needed to kill in order to complete her transformation. Nicholas Boyle would be a suitable mark. She needed to break free of her pattern in order to progress and he was in the right place at the right time for my purposes.

As I planned, Abigail reacted very badly to the murder of her sire and crush, and she believed Boyle responsible as I had intended. When he returned to the house to plead his innocence with her, Abigail gutted him with a knife and feasted on his blood in a frenzy. 

I acted as a guardsman and I flung Alana against a wall before she had the chance to see anything. Even in human form, my strength is far greater than that of a normal person. I bruised my colleague more than I even meant to. 

I listened to Abigail feasting and waited for the silence of her realisation to occur. She came back to herself slowly and I made it my business to be the first face she saw with her true vampire eyes.

"He was going to kill me.”

"You butchered him."

“No...” she choked.

"As I told you, I am here to help you. I will help you if you ask me to," I told her, passively, and added, "at great risk to my career and my life. You have a choice. They will not understand what you are; why you had to do this. They will believe you are worse than your father."

She stared at me in stunned silence, the blood on her face shiny and red; a lovely contrast of colour against her white skin and brilliant blue eyes.

"We will hide the body. We will say he attacked you and ran. They trust me, Abigail." 

_"I will use that trust against them, for you,"_ I added silently.

So caught was she in the haze of her bloodlust and the confusion it bestowed, she was silent on all fronts. I reached into her mind and slid in with complete ease, commanding her trust without any resistance whatsoever. She was defenceless in that moment and I took full advantage. From that moment on, Abigail Hobbs would know on an instinctive and preternatural level that _I_ was her true sire. The veil of manipulation and intrigue fell away and she was mine.

Abigail came to visit me a few nights later, after we were returned to Baltimore and life was continuing on as normal. She jumped over the walls of the facility, stretching the wings of her new supernatural form, and ran to my office through the night. The cold and the fear were concerns that could not touch her anymore.

"Hello Abigail," I greeted her arrival on the upper deck of my office, startling her. She had thought me oblivious to the way she sneaked in and climbed up the wall.

"How'd you know it was me?"

I turned to her with an open gaze, inviting her to guess. Of all the things I could still sense from her, curiosity was the one that felt like the greater motivator. I had known this would come, sooner or later. "Come down from there," I commanded, and she obeyed without question.

"My father knew what Marissa was... and what I was becoming," she said, hesitantly. "He killed for me. He ate them for me. Called it 'honouring' every part of them. Like the deer we killed b-before I... that's how he lived with himself."

I pocketed my hands and listened to her, making no attempt to respond and doing my best to appear entirely non-threatening as she approached me. 

"He knew what I was because Marissa told him. But how did you know?" A slight flare of her nostrils betrayed that she was trying to figure me out. "You smell human. But... you're not." She frowned. "You're glad I killed Nicholas Boyle. You wanted me to become... this."

"What would be the alternative? That you would never eat again?"

Abigail was clenching her fists but otherwise making no further move towards me, though I sensed she wanted to come closer. "You're the one who called the house. They think... whoever called the house is a serial killer. Just like my dad."

"I am nothing like your dad,” I was quick to assure her. “People do not understand beyond the realms of their own small experiences. We are not creatures like them, Abigail."

"I think I saw you in my dreams, the night Marissa died, when Will was killing me the way my father tried to. You were watching. Who... what are you?"

"I am... a friend, Abigail. I want nothing more than to help you."

Abigail was reaching into my mind, trying to touch some part of me that would give a clue. I held her at bay, easily, from the depths but allowed her to catch sight of a few glimmers on the surface level of my thoughts. It wouldn't do to have her feel suspicious or powerless in my presence after all.

"Not just me. Will is important to you."

I feigned discomfort at her discernment. "Yes."

"You want me... to help him?"

An image of Abigail tearing Will's throat out and pouring her blood into his mouth assaulted me. She immediately thought I must want him turned into a vampire like herself.

"Not in that way," I said, firmly and with a flash of warning against even contemplating it. "He is on a precipice. Will is already changing, much as you have. He needs a guardian, just as I have guided you to become what you were meant to be. He needs someone strong to watch him from the shadows. You have the potential to be so strong, Abigail."

"That's why you saved me." It wasn't a question; it was finality in stuttered breath.

"Yes."

"What will he become?"

I had anticipated the question and thought a great deal on it. This would be a tightrope of expression, with no margin for error. I had to manage what she knew about my game very carefully if it was to succeed in the end.

"What you became in the embrace of Marrissa Schurr."

Her eyebrows rose towards her hairline and she ducked her head. Had there been any blood to rise to her cheeks, it would have done so at those words.

"He does not know," I said, quickly. "He cannot know."

Abigail looked into my eyes for a long moment. "I didn't know what I was going to become either. I didn't want it."

"No. But now you feel freedom. You can jump any walls they place you inside, you can run through the night to the places you wish to be; you can even live for an eternity. No forts will contain you. You will become stronger than you ever dared to dream."

I knew I had hit the intended nerve.

"You wouldn't change what you are now," I pushed.

Abigail slowly shook her head and a shaky smile touched her lips.

"We are marked for a greater purpose than those weak things we feast on. I recognise Will for what he is intended to be. He cares for you, as I do, and just as he and I have a sense of duty towards you, so you must love and protect him while he is weak. I cannot do it alone."

 _"You desire him,"_ she whispered silently into the ether.

I responded to the silent suggestion with a slight smile. I liked her cleverness a great deal. Not too sharp to be dangerous to me; not too dim to be useless. Just right.

"And when he becomes strong, like us?" she asked.

"We will become a family."

The note of cautious happiness at the prospect of filling in the hole at her core, which opened with the loss of her parents, stung her in her gut and reverberated around us. The prospect of family was an important one to this young girl.

Finally, she fixed her eyes onto mine with a heavy intent. "I will keep your secrets," she said.

"And I'll keep yours."

With that promise, I knew that her fate and mine were truly bound and sealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! All feedback and suggestions for future plot development welcome :)


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